World’s Second Largest Oil Field Peaks!
If any of you have doubted the upcoming reality of peak oil perhaps this will change your mind:
It was an incredible revelation last week that the second largest oil field in the world is exhausted and past its peak output. Yet that is what the Kuwait Oil Company revealed about its Burgan field.
Kuwait was attempting to push production to 1.9 million barrels per day (bpd) but the field peaked at 1.7 million bpd. More detail in the full story.
Are we as a region, state and country going to be proactive or reactive? We should be rushing to expand our mass transit options for the region and abandoning all expansions of the roadway system such as the proposed Mississippi River Bridge.
– Steve
I think the snippet of the story you quoted is a bit misleading- it says that ” the second largest oil field in the world is exhausted and past its peak output.” The oil field is not exhausted, though it is past its peak output. Definitely two different things. Past peak output just means that every day after this, it will produce less oil. there is still oil there, so I wouldn’t call it ‘exhausted’.
[REPLY – I think you are right to say that the word ‘exhausted’ is going a bit too far. But at the rate they are extracting the oil now that it has peaked it will be exhausted sooner rather than later. – SLP]
wow, this is a bummer.
But who didn’t see it coming.
And to answer the question, we will probably be reactive, rather than proactive. My teacher who lives O’Fallon and drives everywhere thought it would be some sort of poetic justice if the post katrina prices started killing SUV owners, but I couldn’t help but think that while I agreed, people who live in places like O’Fallon are the ones with the real situation to worry about. Real peak oil, rather than off-line refinery issues is going to be harsh, and nobody is going to know what to do. The public will be scratching their heads in their sleep.
Before peak oil, however, there will be the phenomenon of “peak tax.” Oil demand will certainly outpace oil supply, but even sooner, fuel taxes will not be able to keep up with road building demand.
Folks love new and maintained highways, but they don’t want higher taxes to pay for them. Even if gas prices stay around $2 per gallon in the near future, fuel tax receipts can’t keep up with the American appetite for more lane miles per person.